Neversmoker

Grieving, I walked all day. Downhill toward mountains
risen out of dawn and rising into false mist.
Misdiagnosis. Strange clouds over vanishing
summits. Walking in a fog of elegy, I praised
nothing—not sunlight, not sidewalks, nor palms, neither
the sacred rot-orange air of this pastiche town,
America of Americas, capital
of American disparity, nor the town.
I was there and not there every step of the way.
Other than the weather, this is no place to walk
or to mourn, not in public, though I rarely raved
alone. But those days even the weather was spoiled:
the true mist lifted before noon but the haze
never cleared. Pneumonia, your penultimate
diagnosis. This walking grief, my epitaph.

Grieving, I walked every day. When wildfires came
I walked. It dyed the Valley acid and deep rust
for a week, maybe two. Sunset all afternoon.
The smoke lingered longer than that, in eyes, hair,
lungs. Irreversible. Permanent. Restlessness,
it sickens, but I was never healthy, and so,
under Easter-egg skies, I kept walking, breath un-
buried in a chapel of tented palms. After
forty days I shaved my beard, got my hair cut, too.
The wildfires had gone; it was great viaducts
of normal gray smog that now swallowed my leaving,
an archway of starlight, or simple lamplight, or
moonlight that announced my return to no one,
to nowhere, nothing, to you, and echoed into dawn
when mountains rose like smoke unrooted from the earth.